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Smart Power Grid Could Wreak Havoc On Itself
MrSeb writes "Smart power grid monitoring that lets you pick the exact cheapest time to run the dishwasher or recharge your electric car may put too much power (so to speak) in the hands of the consumer, according to a new study by MIT. Researchers say that users receiving minute-by-minute pricing information might cycle off-peak power use more rapidly than utilities can spool up their power plants. In other words, it's OK if you're the only person charging your Chevy Volt at 2am in the morning, but if a whole town does it exactly the same time... there will be issues."
they will quickly become peak hours, I have the upmost faith in our utilities to gouge us for whatever they can
The big question that seemed/seems lost in all this "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype is how an energy grid that can barely handle our energy needs AS IT IS is supposed to function when a significant portion of the population replaces their evil petroleum cars with electricity-draining electrics. When I've asked that question in the past to my usual suspect lineup of hippie friends (who also think that organic food and wind turbines are going to save us all too), the only answer I ever got was a vague "Well, most of that'll be happening at night, when the power demand is down anyway." But we're talking HUGE power usage spikes with those cars. Think of how much our system is already taxed when HVAC units have to cool a 10-degree-higher heat wave. Now imagine half the population plugging cars into the gird every night that draw WAY more power than any consumer HVAC unit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You could be charging your car at 2AM in the afternoon!
These researchers clearly misunderstood the idea of a "smart" power grid. It is not intended to let you control when you consume your electricity so as to save money. It is intended to let the government/corporations control when you consume electricity.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
We need to store power so that we can only use that power at a constant rate 24/7.
He's right! And if everyone in town flushes their toilet at the same time, all the pipes will burst and we'll all die!
The solutions here are a case of "No shit Sherlock." Put in a random offset in the update cycling - They do the same thing for automatic software updates already. If you schedule for an update every half hour it might actually update anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes (adjust delay as needed for application). The random staggering keeps everyone from grabbing an update (and thus cycling their power hungry appliances on) at the same time.
Get a web developer
Perfect solution. Charge capacitor whenever you want at the lowest cost hours. Use said stored charge to power any devices you want at home including your car.
Yeah i know doesn't exist now/yet. But i don't see why it couldn't, you're moving capacity from the grid to the end point.
Both storage and production should be distributed as widely as possible. If half the homes in your neighborhood have solar panels, wind turbines, and on-site storage, then there will be much less need for the coal-fired "utility" plant to adjust to localized spikes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Wouldn't allow everyone to receive the power at one time. If the plants were overloaded, two things could happen, A) pricing jumps up automatically, causing some devices to not consume power due to their price rate limiting.
Second, all the smart equipment in the grid could simply not pass full amperage through to the receiver while the plant is spooling up. The smart meters can provide rolling blackouts as needed to keep the grid under control. These smart devices in the home would be aware of they reduced power availability and simply wait until the grid told them there was sufficient power to activate.
Smart devices that want to turn on at certain times would not turn on exactly at that time, there would be a random number generator which adds some sort of randomized delay so that you set it to run when the price drops to $0.05/hour, and when that occurs, it waits some random amount of time between 0 and 30 minutes. All smart devices do the same thing, effectively giving the grid time to compensate and allow plants to spool up as needed. The smart devices can also be told the grid is overloaded so please wait.
We're talking about a SMART GRID ... you simply program the devices to avoid the problem. If you don't, its not a SMART grid, its just a grid with some silly controllers on it.
Second, once the power company realizes that everyone charges their electric cars at 2am during the price drop ... they simply spool the plants up in advance so they are ready for the load. It'll be rather predictable, kind of like the early morning when everyone gets up and starts using hair dryers and electric ranges, microwaves, electric hot water heaters and all that. They just spool the plants up in advance as the load is rather predictable.
Someone at MIT is missing the tree because they keep looking at the forest.
The grid and these devices are communicating with each other, the grid can simply tell the devices to wait a minute, its not ready, and if they try now they are going to get denied. This isn't a difficult problem to solve, I'm fairly certain it would be trivial to implement the software required on the cheapest of microcontrollers. An Arduino for instance would have no problem dealing with this from both the grid side or the home device side.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
70%? Source, please. If everyone slowly charges their cars over 10-16 hours, this might work, but if many people want to charge their cars at the same time, it will bring the grid down to its knees. An electric car charger can add as much strain to a grid as a whole house.
You entirely missed the point.
By design cars are planned to support multiple charging modes. The most basic designs assume a fast charge and a slow charge. Those charging at night will use the slow charge method.. Furthermore, there has even been discussion on allowing the car to participate in the smart meter network such that it can intelligent switch based on current grid load in the neighborhood.
So long story short, typical charging at night, is fully expected the charge cycle to be spread out over at least 6-8 hours; if not longer.
Its not like the people planning this stuff are absolute fucking idiots. Making such lame assumptions tends to point the finger in the opposite direction.
I've been saying this for years - despite what boosters of electric cars would have you believe, there isn't a magical well of electrical power available at night.
Yes there is. You've been wrong for years.
The utilities have spent the better part of a century either finding customers for the overnight low demand period or optimizing their networks to not generate unneeded power in the first place.
But they haven't found enough customers for overnight electricity to make the demand anything like during the day. As to "optimising the networks", power station capacity that is there during the day is also there at night. Whilst much of it is currently taken off line, if night time power demands increase, then they can leave more of them on-line at night.
Of course there are consequences to changes. But that's a very different thing from there being catastrophic, or even difficult consequences.
The question I raised was basically "Yep the technology works, but how are you going to change the mindset of people away from ME ME ME to US US US?".
The same way - and the only way - you usually get large numbers of people to engage in apparently cooperative or altruistic behaviour: bribery. Offer people a small reduction in electricity rates (or a cash rebate, or some other real-money incentive) in exchange for allowing the utility to remotely adjust/control their consumption.
Many utilities (in the United States and elsewhere) are already doing this with air conditioner thermostats. They offer a rebate or rate break in exchange for giving the utility the ability to remotely shut off your air conditioner for a set period of time (generally no more than one hour per day, and often less) during high demand periods. Some have gone to even 'smarter' systems, which allow the end-user a small number of 'overrides'. (Usually you can go without the A/C for a few minutes, but if you're hosting a party and need the cooling, then you can have it on a handful of occasions each year. This little bit of added flex)
I see no serious technological, political, or social barrier to implementing a similar system to regulate charging systems for electric vehicles. If anything, there's even more flexibility here--the car (and its owner) don't care whether it does its six hours of charging between 9pm and 3am, or between midnight and 6am, or as a dozen 30-minute blocks spread over the whole night.
~Idarubicin
off peak power usage is a technology of the 60s-80s, e.g. for heating to use electricity used in industry during the daytime.
i always imagined a smart grid would mean that not everybody turns on at 2am but that you get even a little bit a better rate but letting the company decide when your car will be charged (e.g. sometimes between 1am and 8am).
Just randomly bias each smart meter or print different peak/off peak times on everyones bills.
Realtime minute by minute rates could actually use feedback from the grid to improve reliability or respond to emergencies where n-1 could otherwise not be achived. You just include grid stability in the cost calculation.
Basically, as part of her graduate work in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (about 1990), my wife (Cynthia Kurtz) did computer simulations of digital organisms, and discovered that sometimes being "dumb" is really being smart, because you don't stick with the smart crowd who ends up competing over the same resource. People did not want to believe her results because they went against all the "foraging theory" of the time. She only got an MA out of that, not a PhD. She presented her results at an early ALife conference. Now people rediscover that effect in smart power grids...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Smart grids don't work like the summary is suggesting! ... it is surplus power that is sold cheap
a) there is no power plant spooled up
b) it is not that you just "activate your dishwasher". It is a market operation: I buy power for the actual price, is the buy order processed, the dishwasher activates.
It is impossible in a smart grid that to many dish waters activate.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You, 6 digits id dare to tell a 5 digit id about google? :-p
On the off-chance you hadn't been anywhere but /. in the past 40 years.